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Topic: Sinister Forces (Read 53482 times)

Item: May 1985. Reagan at the Nazi cemetery in Bitberg, Germany. Laying a wreath and memorializing the Waffen SS as “victims.” Reagan also proclaimed April 10th as “Croatian Day” in the United States. April 10th, of course, is the anniversary of the day the Nazi Ustashi government under Pavelic took control in Croatia and began its reign of terror in the Balkans, including Catholic Father Kamber’s establishment of a concentration camp at Doboj. The entire Ustashi government, including Pavelic, managed to emigrate safely to Juan Peron’s Argentina after the war.

Item: October 1987. The program for the National Republican Heritage Groups Council meeting lists, as co-chairmen, Anna Chennault (the Taiwanese lobbyist we came across during Nixon’s 1968 “October Surprise” negotiations with Vietnam), and Laszlo Pasztor (former leader of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Youth Division, the Hungarian Nazi Party organ, during World War II). The Host Committee lists such notables as Romanian Iron Guardist (and supporter of Nazi war criminal Valerian Trifa) “Reverend” Florian Galdau; Italian fascist Phil Guarino, who was an associate of Licio Gelli and Roberto Calvi of Masonic P-2 fame; and even that doyenne of the cosmetics industry, Hungarian émigrée Christine Valmy.

Item: September 1988. A flurry of news reports concerning a heavy concentration of Nazis on presidential candidate George Bush’s newly-formed Coalition of American Nationalities, including the usual grouping of Romanian Iron Guardists, Ukrainian SS supporters, Croatian Nazis, and Holocaust-denial activists. This list includes Fred Malek, who, when working for the Nixon White House, compiled an enemies list of “Jewish sounding names.” Malek resigned his position as Bush advisor immediately. He would eventually—and quietly—enter the administration after the election of George Bush.

Fred Malek went on to more recent notoriety as a top aide to Sarah Palin, and one of her staunchest defenders in the party in the wake of her resignation. By the way.

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The presence of Nazi war criminals in Africa has rarely been addressed, if only because Africa itself is still a “heart of darkness” for most Americans and Europeans, a treacherous land of incomprehensible intrigue. That Nazis such as Siegfried Mueller would have found their way to the Congo comes as no surprise. The opportunities for war and the spoils of war were too numerous. In addition, with the advent of Lumumba, the struggle became characterized as a war between Capitalism and Communism, between the “values” of the West versus those of the East. The renegade Nazis came down squarely on the side of the West and Capitalism, fighting their old enemy the Soviet Communists on the battlegrounds of Katanga province. Enlisted to assist the efforts of the United States, and of the Belgian forces in the region, Nazi mercenaries were only too glad to offer their expertise in torture, interrogation, and military drill. This is the dirty secret of the African wars of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. More attention has been paid to the presence of Nazi war criminals in Latin America, but the activities of Nazis in Africa, Asia and Australia are only now coming to light in the literature.

For instance, under Otto Skorzeny’s leadership, the Middle East became a safe haven for Nazis on the run. Moving there in 1953, Skorzeny managed to find posts for a lot of his old friends. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spiritual leader for thousands of Muslims in Palestine, had worked for Schellenberg’s counter-intelligence division of the SS. King Farouk of Egypt had collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis during the war years. Skorzeny became the “chief military adviser” to General Mohammed Naguib of the new republic in Egypt, selected and groomed for that position by an “unholy alliance” of former Nazi spymaster and now head of the CIA’s anti-Soviet effort in Europe, Reinhard Gehlen, and the CIA’s own Allen Dulles. Skorzeny began the happy task of recruiting as many former SS officers as he could find to fill the ranks of what would become Egyptian strongman Nasser’s secret police, including some four hundred SS men as a special operations group involved in the training of Palestinian commandos for attacks across the Gaza Strip. Members of Field Marshall Rommel’s Afrika Korps were also located and turned over to Nasser’s command and, it is said, that some of these men were involved in the quiet liquidation of Jews in Egypt in the 1950s.

But, in addition to the rank-and-file SS criminals sponsored by the Skorzeny/Nasser/Dulles triumvirate, there were also the superstars. These men included Adolf Eichmann, who sojourned in Egypt before moving on to Argentina; General Oskar Dirlewanger, the Butcher of Warsaw; Leopold Gleim, in charge of the SS in Poland; and, even more ominously, a gaggle of concentration camp medical men. Dr. Hans Eisele was Buchenwald’s medical officer, and he was recruited by Skorzeny together with Heinrich Willerman, his opposite number at Dachau. These men formed a core of specialists in interrogation and torture techniques, seconded to the Egyptian secret service.

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One does not automatically think of South Africa when one discusses chemical and biological weapons, but during the era of apartheid and before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became that country’s first black president, the Republic of South Africa pursued a “weapons of mass destruction” campaign as serious as any other. In cooperation with foreign firms and agencies, the South African Defence Force (SADF) and its CBW project leader—Dr. Wouter Basson—developed an arsenal of poisons, both chemical and biological, for use against critics of the regime. The cabal in charge of this effort included the chief of staff of the defense force, the chief of staff of intelligence, and the surgeon general, as well as Dr. Basson.

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The toxins involved included “anthrax in cigarettes, botulinum in milk and paraoxon in whiskey—in the Commission’s view clearly murder weapons.” Even more bizarre was the baboon fetus. The inclusion of a baboon foetus on the list, dated late July 1989 (just prior to such a foetus being found in the garden of Archbishop Tutu’s house), as well as a reference to chemical and biological operatives, indicated that the items may well have found their way, directly or indirectly, into the hands of operatives of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). The CCB, of course, was the Orwellian-nomenclatured South African secret police, responsible for assassinations in other African countries as well as within South Africa, and which maintained offices in Europe for monitor- ing anti-apartheid activities and conducting operations against those who opposed white rule in South Africa. The CCB has claimed responsibility for numerous murders in Africa, many of which were committed with toxins developed under Project Coast. Another front company for Project Coast and Dr. Basson was Delta G Scientific, which was involved in the development of street drugs such as ecstasy and methaqualone. This was admittedly used for crowd control, but also for assassinations in which prisoners were injected with muscle relaxants … and then dropped from planes. In addition, Basson was sent to Croatia in 1991 during a negotiation to buy 500 kg of methaqualone from the Croatians (including “high-ranking government officials”), which was brought back to South Africa. This is the deal that eventually led to Basson’s arrest when he was discovered holding $40 million worth of Vatican bearer bonds. His involvement in Project Coast gradually became revealed after his arrest (in Switzerland) and the discovery of the four trunks of documents in his possession. But Croatia was not the only country on Basson’s list. He also visited Taiwan to meet with CBW specialists there, as well as the United States, where—ac- cording to the Commission documents—the South African surgeon general met in 1981 with “Americans who were part of the United States CBW programme”; these Commission documents “demonstrate their willingness to assist the South Africans.” As a reminder, this would have been during the Reagan administration and during the time of the United States’ boycott of trade with South Africa.

Pat Robertson is not only a Christian minister with a congregation composed of television viewers who donate heavily to his cause. Robertson is also a businessman. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, and the argument could be made that if more ministers and priests were businesspeople, there would be less corruption in the churches and clergymen would be more understanding of the day-to-day stresses of dealing with jobs, employers, volatile markets, and the like. The concept of the “worker priest” was popular for a while in Europe in the years after World War II, although it gradually took on a Marxist tinge.

Robertson, however, is no “worker priest.” His business deals are routinely in the millions of dollars and involve the exploitation of the natural resources of developing nations, what used to be called “the Third World.” Investing heavily in Africa, Robertson created the African Development Corporation, or ADC. This was allegedly not connected in any way with his religious broadcasting operations, although it is hard to tell how these companies are financed.

What is known for sure is that, in 1992, the ADC entered into negotiations with the Zairean government of President Mobutu for the development of the diamond trade in the southern mining town of Tshikapa, along with projects including logging in other areas of Zaire. The idea, as touted by the Robertson organization, was that it had secured Mobutu’s blessing to use some of the profits from these enterprises to boost humanitarian aid projects in Zaire. The fact that Mobutu had already plundered his country’s economy, banking hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars in foreign accounts in Switzerland and Belgium, suggests the cynicism of this self-congratulation. It has been estimated that Mobutu could have single-handedly solved his country’s economic and humanitarian problems with the funds he had salted away abroad while his countrymen’s per capita annual income was something like $500, belying the necessity of a Robertson–Mobutu partnership.

Robertson initiated Operation Blessing as a tax-exempt humanitarian mission to help those less fortunate in Africa, buying three Caribou aircraft in the process, for the ostensible purpose of flying medical supplies and doctors to those areas of Zaire being flooded by refugees, both internal refugees as well as those from the growing Rwandan crisis across the border. The Caribou are designed for short-take-off and landing (STOL): Vietnam-era aircraft ideal for short runways in the jungle. Robertson went on the air in the United States extolling the virtues of his operation and showing how the poor Zaireans and Rwandans were being helped by the smiling Christian American efficiency of Operation Blessing.

Unfortunately for the poor Zaireans and Rwandans, Operation Blessing was largely a sham. Pilots who had been employed by the organization revealed to newsmen that their job was not hauling medicine to Goma or the other regions where people were starving to death or dying from a host of treatable illnesses; rather, they were involved with moving mining and dredging equipment to Robertson’s diamond mines. It got so bad that one of the pilots had “Operation Blessing” removed from the plane’s tailfins. Out of forty flights that had been flown in Zaire for Operating Blessing, only one or two had actually had anything to do with humanitarian aid.

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Eventually, in 1995, Robertson pulled the plug on the African wing of Operation Blessing (possibly due to all the bad publicity), but continued with his business deals in other parts of Africa, such as in Liberia in support of President Charles Taylor, a man with a human rights abuse record at least as long as Mobutu’s. Taylor’s use of death squads, his support of mercenary groups who use Liberia as a staging area for attacks in other countries, and his involvement in arms trading made him a ’90s equivalent to former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin; he had even been known to conduct torture and interrogation sessions in his own home, the Executive Mansion. Corruption was rife and unapologetic in Liberia, with Taylor and his cronies pocketing at least 20% of Liberia’s annual budget, according to a 1998 US Department of State Country Report on Liberia.

In 1998 Robertson created a company called Freedom Gold for investment in Liberia. His focus remained roughly the same: the exploitation of Liberia’s raw materials and natural resources—gold, diamonds, oil, lumber—with the expectation that profits would be plowed back into the Liberian economy for humanitarian efforts. Well, Liberia—like Zaire—certainly needs humanitarian aid, of that there can be no question. The problem arises when dictators, consumed with greed and the desire for personal wealth, make deals with Christian ministers-turned-businessmen. There is no earthly way that profits would have been reinvested in the poor of either Liberia or Zaire in any significant amount, when the leaders of those respective governments had control over the profits. It would have been naïve to think so. That Robertson himself would have been remunerated for his assistance to these regimes goes without saying; but that he would have been able to bring this money back to the people of Zaire or Liberia, untouched by the corrupt fingers of Mobutu or Taylor, was impossible.

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Another “Christian” ruler supported by Robertson on television and in his books is Jorge Serrano, the bizarre President of Guatemala who wanted to create a Pentecostal Christian government in Guatemala. The list goes on and on. Here is Robertson sitting down to dinner with notorious Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson. Here is Robertson raising two million dollars for Guatemalan military dictator General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores. Here is Robertson being saluted by the Contras at their base camp in Honduras. Here is Robertson once again in Guatemala, this time in support of death-squad leader and eventual president Rios Montt, a born-again Christian who suspended his country’s constitution and proceeded to murder thousands of his fellow citizens.

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The fact that the Christian Right raised millions of dollars in aid to the Contras has been “backburnered” in most histories of the affair. Indeed, Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network was only one source of aid and support to the Contras; in addition, we find the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon as well as the Knights of Malta fraternal society involved in fund-raising and other efforts on behalf of the rebels.

The Knights of Malta participation is interesting because, at the time, its head was J. Peter Grace, an old friend of Pat Robertson and the godfather to his children. It was Grace who famously hired a Nazi scientist, Otto Ambrose, to work for the W. R. Grace Corporation even though his past as a chemist and director of I.G. Farben during the war was well-documented. Grace seems to be another of those monied Americans who feel an investment in fascism is always good for business, and who support (sometimes secretly, sometimes openly) all manner of right-wing dictators and death-squad capos in the defense of Christianity, democracy, and white supremacy.

As for Reverend Moon and his Unification Church, this convicted felon (for tax evasion) has supported the extreme right in America for decades. The Unification Church itself fronts for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and when the author himself was approached by the Church in the 1970s they owned—in addition to a network of churches with a sophisticated marketing campaign aimed at scientists and other intellectuals—a rifle factory in Korea. Reverend Moon himself believes that Jesus will return to earth as a Korean, and he has let it be known that he believes this Second Coming involves his own person. Incredibly, with all of this clearly heretical belief openly promulgated, Christian ministers such as Pat Robertson have no problem at all in sharing a podium with Moon and enjoying the international reach of the Unification Church.

The main organizer of the private funding endeavor was Major General John Singlaub (retired), who came to brief prominence during the Iran-Contra investigation. Singlaub, a decorated Army veteran who had worked closely with the CIA over the years, took control of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1984.

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The WACL is a notorious hotbed of Nazis, pro-Nazis, and neo-Nazis from every continent. The number of groups involved in the WACL is almost embarrassing in its composition of ethnic organizations devoted not only to the destruction of Communism, but to the advancement of a neo-fascist agenda. Singlaub was able to find support from the governments of Taiwan and South Korea, as well as from Saudi Arabia, in his globe-trotting mission: support that went to the Contras in their efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

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President Reagan’s support for both Singlaub and the WACL is also well-documented. For instance, it was Reagan who, in 1983, told Yaroslav Stetsko, former Nazi premier of Ukraine during the War, “Your struggle is our struggle. Your dream is our dream.” At the time, Stetsko was a leader of the secretive Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B), which collaborated extensively with the Nazis in their invasion of the Ukraine, and in 1983 was representing the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), part of the bewildering matrix of acronyms and ethnic subgroups that are the legs and arms of the WACL.

Prescott Bush was an active Nazi supporter, whose company—Union Banking, a subsidiary of W. A. Harriman & Company—had its assets seized by the US Government in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. This was done by US Government Vesting Order No. 248, for those who think I am making this up. The gist of the government’s case was that, for many years, Prescott Bush and George Walker (his father-in-law) had been actively raising money to support the fledgling Nazi Party, laundering the funds through Harriman and its subsidiary Union Banking. According to Loftus and Aarons in their Secret War Against the Jews, George Herbert Walker was “one of Hitler’s most powerful supporters in the United States,” and was under Congressional investigation as early as 1934, when it was believed that Walker’s Hamburg-Amerika Line “subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States.”

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Eugenics was the new “science” of population control, which was a code word for genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” and the Bush–Walker team provided logistical support for the Third International Congress of Eugenics that was held in New York on August 21-23, 1932, at the American Museum of Natural History, ensuring that Nazi eugenicists were present at the Congress by providing free passage aboard their shipping line, Hamburg-Amerika.

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It is clear that some of the most important businessmen in America felt they had a vested interest in promoting the Nazi Party, and through their support of ancillary programs such as the Eugenics Congress, we can begin to put together a more complete picture of this interest: America for white people, Europe for the Nazis, forming a broad alliance of power stretching over both sides of the Atlantic and ensuring the enslavement of millions upon millions of people who were not members of the club.

“After the war, certain influential members of the Mellon family maintained close ties with the CIA. The Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as conduits for Agency funds. Furthermore, Richard Helms was a frequent weekend guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh during his tenure as CIA director (1966-1973).” In addition to the Mellons, members of the Morgan, Vanderbilt, and DuPont families were very active in the OSS making it essentially a “rich man’s club.” David Bruce himself was the son of a US Senator and a millionaire even before his marriage to Ailsa Mellon.

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Thus, William Mellon Hitchcock’s presence at dinner in London in 1962 with Thomas Corbally and Stephen Ward is highly suggestive of an intelligence angle. At the time of the Profumo affair, Hitchcock was flying back and forth between New York and London: in London, to hang out with Ward and Corbally (the latter will become important a bit later on), and in New York to hang out with Timothy Leary, who had just returned from an aborted LSD-commune experiment in Mexico and was looking for another site. He found one at Hitchcock’s Dutchess County, New York, estate: Millbrook.

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As it turns out, Hitchcock had so many ties to the intelligence community—mostly through banking circles and money-laundering operations—that it raises one’s paranoia level to a new … high. As described in The Nine, LSD was introduced to the American public through the CIA, which wanted to test its effectiveness for everything from mind control to crowd control. We then discover Hitchcock’s involvement with the CIA and CIA-front organizaions, such as Castle Bank and Resorts International. We also see Hitchcock turning state’s evidence against his old LSD chemist, Nicholas Sand, even though Hitchcock himself admitted he had financed Sand’s operation for the manufacture and distribution of millions of hits of LSD.

Richard Mellon Scaife’s antecedents were also intelligence-connected in World War II. His father Alan Scaife was a major in the OSS. The Mellon side of the family, of course, included all those OSS Mellons with their cozy relationships extending to the modern incarnation of the OSS, the CIA. While Bill Hitchcock’s involvement with twentieth century American history seems divided between the LSD culture on one side and money laundering on the other—including a variety of intelligence and high-level Republican Party cooperative efforts—Richard Scaife’s politics are worn on his sleeve for all to see. He has been identified in the mainstream media as the treasure chest for the anti-Clinton campaigns of the 1990s, supporting a wide variety of efforts to destroy the Democrat. We learned of the Paula Jones scandal through Scaife’s investigation into Clinton’s private life, an investigation undertaken with private detectives and well-placed bribes, as well as with investigative reporters working for his own newspaper. It was Scaife who joined hands with Pat Robertson—he of the “jewels for Jesus” investments in Zaire—to promote a video cassette purporting to tell the truth about Clinton the mass murderer entitled “The Clinton Chronicles,” a conspiracy theory wrapped in innuendo and basted with misdirection which, if anything, gives the very idea of “conspiracy theory” a bad name.

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The plan had been to have George Bush serve for two terms, during which a consolidation of power could take place: the “ideological forces” mentioned by Scaife in 1994. When Clinton threatened that, action was required.

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Lucianne Goldberg had worked for Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s first and virtually only campaign manager. Chotiner had worked for Nixon since his first run at a political office after the War, orchestrating the red-baiting and Jew-baiting whisper tactics that helped Nixon in his California campaigns. Chotiner’s involvement with organized crime is no secret; his delight in dirty tricks was passed on to his student as a virtual religion.

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Word of her state of mind reached Goldberg through another friend, and Goldberg approached Tripp for more information. About all Tripp could come up with on her own were the shenanigans that took place around the time of the Foster suicide, and a lot of gossip about various staff people and the lack of organization within the administration. Goldberg was not satis- fied with that. It just wasn’t enough to sell a book … or destroy a president. She wanted more. Tripp eventually made the acquaintance of another White House staffer, a former intern named Monica Lewinsky. Monica claimed to have been having a love affair with Bill Clinton. This was just what Goldberg was looking for.

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During this time, several other events were taking place behind the scenes. In the first case, the anti-Clinton lobby had worked itself into a frenzy with something called “The Clinton Chronicles.” Financed by Scaife, this was an “exposé” of the Clinton mafia and its evil machinations—including murder—over the years. As mentioned before, the source material for the Chronicles was rather flimsy, largely based as it was on the “revelations” of a “disgruntled former employee,” Larry Nichols. Nichols had been fired from his state government post in Arkansas because he had been using the office facilities to raise funds for … the Contras.

The record of Manson's visit to the Scientology Centre in LA is found:

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In Los Angeles, he went to the Scientology Celebrity Center. Now this was more like it. Here he could mingle with the elite. I managed to obtain a copy of the original log entry: “7/31/68, new name, Charlie Manson, Devt., No address, In for processing = Ethics = Type III.” The receptionist—who, by Type III, meant “psychotic”—sent him to the Ethics office, but he never showed up.

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The Process struck me as a group of occult provocateurs, using radical Christianity as a front. They were adamantly interested in Yippie politics. They boasted to me of various rallies which their vibrations alone had transformed into riots. They implied that there was some kind of connection between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and their own mere presence on the scene.

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Bernard Fensterwald, head of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, told me that Sirhan Sirhan had some involvement with the Process. Peter Chang, the district attorney of Santa Cruz, showed me a letter from a Los Angeles police official to the chief of police in San Jose, warning him that the Process had infiltrated biker gangs and hippie communes.

And Ed Sanders wrote in Win (Workshop in Nonviolence) magazine, “[W]ord came out of Los Angeles of a current FBI investigation of the RFK murder, the investigation growing, as the source put it, out of ‘the Manson case.’ Word came from another source, this one in the halls of Government itself, that several police and investigatory jurisdictions have information regarding other murders that may have been connected to the Robert Kennedy shooting: murders that occurred after RFK’s. A disturbing fact in this regard is that one agency in the Federal Bureaucracy (not the FBI) has stopped a multi-county investigation by its own officers that would have probed into such matters as the social and religious activities of Sirhan Sirhan in early ’68, and into the allegations regarding RFK-connected murders.”

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Conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell put me in contact with Preston Guillory, a former deputy sheriff, who told me, “We had been briefed for a few weeks prior to the actual raiding of Spahn Ranch. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson, that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine-guns fired at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson’s band and told to get out of the area, all sorts of complaints like this. We had been advised to put anything relating to Manson on a memo submitted to the station, because they were supposedly gathering information for the raid we were going to make. Deputies at the station of course started asking, ‘Why aren’t we going to make the raid sooner?’ I mean, Manson’s a parole violator, machine-guns have been heard, we know there’s narcotics and we know there’s booze. He’s living at the Spahn Ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole. Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson.

My contention is this—the reason Manson was left on the street was because our department thought that he was going to attack the Black Panthers. We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther, the body of which could not be found, and the department thought that he was going to launch an attack on the Black Panthers....”

Modern writers like Thomas Harris (who created the unforgettable Hannibal Lecter) have taken this idea one step further: if the serial killer is indeed outside the normal realm of human behavior, then—on an existential level—what does he represent? By comparing the bizarre actions and beliefs of a serial killer to those of cannibals, primitive shamans, etc., we are drawn to the conclusion that these extreme cases of human behavior—eating human flesh, becoming possessed by spiritual forces—point the way to a different view of society, and of reality itself. Thomas Harris’ killers are seeking transformation: either spiritual or psychological transformation or actual physical change. They use murder, torture, and pain as means to this end. In this they are no different from organized killing societies such as the SS, for Hitler himself believed he was using the Nazi Party to create a “new man.”

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Perhaps the most striking feature of the war from the medical point of view has been the enormous scale upon which its conditions have produced functional nervous disorders, a scale far surpassing any previous war, although the Russo-Japanese campaign gave indications of the mental and nervous havoc which the conditions of modern warfare are able to produce. —W. H. R. Rivers to the John Rylands Library, April 9, 1919

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Rivers would devote a great deal of his time towards an understanding of the relationship between “Medicine, Magic and Religion” (as a collection of his essays is entitled), looking for a solution to the problem of the mind-body dichotomy. This, of course, is the bedrock of what would become the mind- control programs of the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese and others, although Rivers—a humanitarian and idealist—would presumably have been horrified to see his insights result in such experimentation.

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Each personality may remember what has happened to the other personalities, or more usually may not. This type of amnesia is common in cases of DID, and was of intense interest to the CIA scientists of MK-ULTRA. Yet, involved with the already heady experience of dealing with a serial killer who may be suffering from DID, we also have—in the fictional case of Psycho but also in the actual case of Ed Gein—the concept of transformation.

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His goal—after being turned down by several sex-change clinics—was to become a woman, and to do this he would don a woman’s actual skin, or a skin suit composed of pieces of various women. That this smacks of pure lycanthropy, as practiced by shamanistic cults the world over, albeit with animal skins, usually goes unnoticed. Yet, to further drive home his message, Harris has his serial killer insert the larva of a specific type of moth into the mouths of his victims when he dumps their bodies. The moth, of course, is a symbol of transformation.

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A more pressing case before us, however, is that of convicted serial killer Arthur Shawcross. In Shawcross we have all the elements of a paranoid fantasy that even Hollywood would find a hard time digesting. A Vietnam veteran, child molester, rapist, and murderer who is set free only to kill again. A man who claimed a history of violent encounters in Vietnam … but whose official Army records deny any substance to the stories. A man whose brain shows evidence of surgical intervention, but whose Army medical records were classified and not permitted to be reviewed by his own defense team. A man who claimed he heard voices, haunted by ghosts no one else could see.

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In the United States, we marginalize political assassins. They are either crazed loners—like Oswald, Hinckley, Chapman—or they are marginal people, such as the Palestinian Sirhan B. Sirhan. The established ruling class of a country cannot accept a sane, reasonable assassin any more than they can accept the points of view of their political or military enemies. Assassins are, by definition, insane or somehow racially or ethnically “other,” if not actually inferior. They do not come from the body politic. They are outsiders, and their outsider status is what causes them to commit these crimes. We cannot afford to give these assassins a soap box from which to convince us of the rightness of their actions, because we may be swayed by a person who is so consumed by political conviction that he picks up a gun and rids the country of someone we may be tempted to realize was a tyrant, and by extension therefore to question the present government altogether. So, we eventually accept a subliminal message every time an assassin is murdered or otherwise silenced before he or she can stand trial: to attack the king is insanity.

The central concept behind the shamanistic initiation is the controlled derangement (reorganization?) of the human mind in such a way that it follows a predictable and useful pattern. I use the term “shamanistic” in the sense that Mircea Eliade and others have done

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The goal was to create the perfect spy and the perfect assassin. The CIA claims they did not succeed at either, at least not through their mind-control projects which fit under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA. However, when we examine the claims and counterclaims of those involved in debunking or supporting the “repressed memory syndrome” concept, we will see that someone, somewhere must be lying.

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As Eliade writes, "The strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder. But the problem was wrongly put. For, on the one hand, it is not true that shamans always are or always have to be neuropathics; on the other hand, those among them who had been ill became shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured…. But if shamanism cannot simply be identified with a psychopathological phenomenon, it is nevertheless true that the shamanic vocation often implies a crisis so deep that it sometimes borders on madness…. But I should like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane; it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology."

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Demonic possession became a household phrase in the 1970s with the publication of the novel The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty, a Hollywood screenwriter. As is well-known by now, the novel was based on an actual case of possession that took place in a small town in Maryland while Blatty was a student at Georgetown University. What is not so well-known is that Blatty himself had been an intelligence officer, specializing in psychological warfare, in the years before writing his famous novel. It was Blatty who also wrote the screenplay for a film that came to be known as The Ninth Configuration (1980) after his original novel Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane, a book and film that come as close to describing the arcane world of military psychiatry as any (imagine Catch-22 meets The Manchurian Candidate).

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This condition would have been of utmost interest to the mind-control researchers for all that was implied in terms of memory and control. If the scientists could create an alter personality in a given subject, for instance, they could create a robot. This would be true only if the scientists were able to control the alter themselves. This would probably be difficult to do, since the evidence at the moment suggests that the alter is a defense mechanism of the original personality, to protect it against a traumatic episode (child abuse, for instance, being the most common and most documented cause). Also, there is a danger that the alter—possessed of a perfect memory—would not be the ideal mechanism for creating spies and assassins. Yet, the basic functions of multiple personality disorder would have attracted the scientists and they would have sought ways in which they could create and/or manipulate multiples. Fortunately for them, there is a large literature on voluntary possession. As documented by Oesterreich and in other places, this experience is worldwide, and the author has been privileged to witness this phenomenon firsthand in various countries, notably in Haiti, in the United States, and in parts of Asia.

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Therefore, it would be only a matter of time before the mind-control researchers began to scour the records of occultists, magicians, witches, voodoo priests and Siberian shamans to isolate the techniques that were used since time immemorial to supplant a person’s normal, comfortable, everyday consciousness and replace it with a powerful, all-knowing (and sometime violent, and always deceptive) alter personality; and to use those alters to uncover the action of deep memory, for MK-ULTRA was, at its core, an assault on the Land of Memory: the creation of new, false memories and the eradication of old, dangerous ones.

The Finders case, documented below, is a very, very strange one. It's worth looking into on your own, as even these extracts don't do justice to just how crazy the whole thing is.

I normally don't go in for this sort of thing, but if you suffer from PTSD or similar related to child abuse or ritualistic killing of animals, you may want to skip this entire post. Yes, that's a trigger warning.

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Although there are many documented cases of children being trained as fanatic soldiers and killers—especially in Asia, in some celebrated cases in the Golden Triangle, and in Africa—we choose to believe that this is a bizarre aberration. Yet, as we investigate the evidence in the following pages, we will walk into the center of a nightmare of unbelievable proportions because this single, documented, American case contains within itself all the elements that we—as serious researchers, journalists and historians—have been taught to treat with skepticism and condescension. We will uncover an organization that was trolling for child subjects (victims) all over the globe; that used these children in strange rituals involving animal sacrifice; that sent these children to secret schools abroad; and that—when on the verge of discovery and exposure—was finally protected by the CIA.

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On February 5, 1987 the US Customs Service received a phone call from Sergeant JoAnn VanMeter of the Juvenile Division of the Tallahassee Police Department in Florida. Six very young children—aged 2 to 7 years— had been found in the apparent custody of two well-dressed men. The children were scampering in a park in Tallahassee, but they appeared to be ill-fed, ill-clothed—some not wearing underwear—and filthy. An anonymous tip to the Tallahassee PD was enough for the police to undertake a routine investigation, questioning the adults and the children.

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One of the two men now in custody gave the police a business card with a statement on one side saying that the “bearer knew his constitutional rights to remain silent and that he intended to do so.” The children could not name the two men either. In fact, they didn’t know the “function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets” and further stated that “they were not allowed to live indoors and were only given food as a reward.”

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They further said that they were on their way to Mexico to go to a school for smart kids.

Remember this, because this...claim...will reappear elsewhere.

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Customs said they would investigate the links of the men to an address in the D.C. area, discovered through a check of the license plate on the van. And this is where it all came together … and then exploded apart.

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A search warrant was obtained, and a Detective Bradley of the Washington MPD informed the Customs agents that an informer reported that a cult known as the Finders was operating out of those addresses, and that the Finders were involved in blood sacrifice, sex orgies involving children, etc.

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By the time the warrant was served, there were no children at the cult headquarters at 3918/20 W. Street, NW, but a large quantity of children’s clothing was found, including diapers and other clothing, though nothing for children past pre-school age. The worse was yet to come, however.

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In another part of the building, filled with computers and files, the detectives found detailed instructions for “obtaining children for unspecified purposes.” I will let Special Agent, US Customs Service, Ramon J. Martinez continue in his own words:

“The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community known as the Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping. There were telex messages using MCI account numbers between a computer terminal believed to be located in the same room, and others located across the country and in foreign locations. One such telex specifically ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy there.… Other documents identified interests in high-tech transfers to the United Kingdom, numerous properties under the control of the Finders, a keen interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law enforcement.”

The next day, Friday February 6, 1987, Martinez and Bradley then proceeded to the Finders’ warehouse at 1307 4th Street, NE. If anything, the take in the warehouse was more horrifying than what was discovered at cult headquarters. Again, to quote Special Agent Martinez:

“I was able to observe numerous documents which described explicit sexual conduct between the members of the community known as Finders. I also saw a large collection of photographs of unidentified persons. Some of the photographs were nudes, believed to be of members of the Finders. There were numerous photos of children, some nude, at least one of which was a photo of a child “on display” and appearing to accent the child’s genitals. I was only able to examine a very small amount of the photos at this time. However, one of the officers presented me with a photo album for my review. The album contained a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a “blood ritual.” The ritual centered around the execution of at least two goats. The photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat’s “womb” and the “baby goats” inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children.”

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The graphic nature of the photographs emphasizes still further that no mere ritual sacrifice of the goats was intended, but a complete disembowelment and dismembering, including a concentration on the sexual organs of the animals.

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“Further inspection of the premises disclosed numerous files relating to activities of the organization in different parts of the world. Locations I observed are as follows: London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica, and “Europe”…There was one file entitled “Pentagon Break-In,” and others referring to members operating in foreign countries.”

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What the agents faced was a mountain of evidence pointing to an international trade in children and the use of children in horrible rituals which were photographed for posterity. They found passports and other travel documents, details for trafficking in foreign currency and in high technology transfer to foreign countries.

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All passport data had been turned over to the State Department, who told MPD that the passports and the travel represented by the passports was within the law, ”even though this involved “travel to Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam from the late 1950s to mid 1970s.” Further, Martinez was told that “the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review.”

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What did the Finders do with the children after they”found” them? Where did they go? Where was the school in Mexico? What did they do there? How many more were there? And … where are they now and what are they doing? And to whom?

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When Lee Harvey Oswald made his famous trip by bus to Mexico City in 1963, ostensibly to obtain a visa for Cuba, he sat next to an Englishman by the name of John Howard Bowen, alias Albert Osborne. Bowen was an “itinerant preacher” of the Baptist persuasion, an elderly gentleman who traveled frequently to Mexico, according to Warren Commission exhibits (mostly FBI interrogation reports). When confronted by the FBI, Bowen claimed he had borrowed the identity of Albert Osborne, an Englishman who was also an itinerant Baptist preacher, when investigated by the Mexican authorities at a time when he couldn’t find his own identification. He claimed that Osborne was an Englishman but that he, Bowen, was born in the United States. Unfortunately, the other passengers on that fabled bus trip to Mexico City identified Bowen as an Englishman, and eventually the FBI concluded that Bowen and Osborne were one and the same.

What is interesting is the fact that Bowen-Osborne was a devoted Nazi both before and during World War II, opposing America’s entry into the war, and ran a fascist camp for boys in rural Tennessee until it was closed down in 1942. At the time of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, there were persistent rumors that Bowen-Osborne was running a school for assassins in Mexico, somewhere in Pueblo, under the guise of a “missionary effort.”

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Gradually, stories of Bowen’s connections to American paramilitary organizations began to circulate, including his involvement with the Minutemen.

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Item: Los Angeles, May 13, 1964. Less than six months after the Kennedy assassination. The 19th Annual Convention and Scientific Program of the Society of Biological Psychiatry takes place. During the convention, it is reported that 450 children, aged 4 to 15, at Creedmore State Hospital have been subjected to a massive program of hallucinogen experimentation, incorporating everything from LSD to psilocybin to various other drugs. Doses are 150 mcg of LSD or 20 mg of psilocybin, daily, “for periods up to several months.” The children ranged from autistic to “slightly schizophrenic” (whatever that means).

The horrifying visions of the shaman-in-training are nearly identical, if not exactly identical, to those that obsess the serial killer: the dismemberments, the excruciating pain, the visions, the voices in the head, the blood lust. It is, as Eliade points out, tantamount to psychopathology. In the case of the shaman, he is eventually cured of this disorder even though it may last for a long time. His society understands what is going on, and they have mechanisms for dealing with it; the shaman will be a valuable addition to their society after the cure, because then he will be able to communicate with the spirit world, to intercede for his neighbors and to foretell the future. The crucial difference between a shaman and a serial killer may be that the latter has externalized the psychological process. What for a shaman—as well as for the artist, the poet, the musician—is an internal nightmare of hallucinogenic proportions becomes, in the hands of the serial killer, a dreadful reality.

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In 1998, the following was reported in the Indonesian press as well as by the Agence France Presse: An Indonesian practitioner of black magic—a type of sorcerer called a dukun—one Ahmad Suraji, was sentenced to death for the murder of forty-two women. He claimed that his father came to him in a dream and told him if he killed seventy women and drank their saliva, his magic powers would be increased and he would—paradoxically—become a better healer.

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The prom took place in May 1978. A month later, Jeffrey invited her to a party at his house. It was not much of a party, according to Ms. Geiger, but just a half dozen people sitting around with no food, no music, not much of anything. At one point during the evening, Dahmer decided he wanted to have a séance to contact the spirit of someone who had died in the house. According to Dahmer, an evil spirit had contacted him and spoken to him, asking him to do things that scared him. As the candles were lit and started to flare up and sputter, Bridget Geiger realized that Dahmer was not joking, and she fled the house, never to see or speak to Dahmer again. That same month, Dahmer claimed his first victim, the young hitchhiker Steven Hicks.

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According to Dahmer, he never killed an animal himself. What argues against this, however, is the scene close to his house of a kind of ritual setting in the woods in which it seems dogs were killed as part of an occult rite. This had taken place the previous year, in 1977, amid reports of missing dogs in the Bath, Ohio neighborhood where he lived. The scene was described by Jim Klippel to the Akron Beacon-Journal: “Somebody must have had a lot of fun with that dog…if that’s what you want to call it. It was skinned and gutted. And about a hundred yards away there had been a large fire and thirteen little fires around it. It looked so much like cult worship that it scared us to death.” The dog that Klippel referred to had been found nailed to a tree.

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It is worthwhile to note here that missing dogs—especially German shepherds—are a recurring theme around cult murders and cult activity, and that the slaughter of dogs was an element of the cult surrounding the Son of Sam killings that we will investigate shortly.

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when he was finally apprehended the body count came to seventeen, including his first victim, Steven Hicks. Their bodies had been dismembered, dissolved in vats of acid in his apartment, stored in a large freezer. Their skulls had been retained, cleaned and defleshed and in some cases painted, and were adorning his altar, his “power altar.” The number of skulls on the altar has been given variously as six (Ressler) or ten (Norris), along with a planned hanging skeleton on either side, a central hanging lamp, and two griffins. The altar was not complete at the time of his arrest, but some of the skulls and the two griffins were in place, as well as candles, incense, and other vaguely occult paraphernalia.

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As we read famed FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler’s interview with Dahmer, the reason Dahmer was fascinated by Exorcist III was the power the possessed had over reality, over the minds and bodies of the rest of the world. The element of “creating illusions” was only a tool, a means to an end. There are many films concerned with the creation of illusions, but only Exorcist III marries this theme with that of demonic possession and serial murder.

What follows is from the testimony of one of Dahmer's intended victims, Tracey Edwards, who managed to escape.

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While waiting for the drug to take effect, and with knife in hand, Dahmer demanded that Edwards watch a videotape with him. It was Exorcist III. Dahmer watched the film intently, at times rocking back and forth, chanting in a humming sound, and seeming to go into a trance (as described in Book II, the same process was used by Mark David Chapman when invoking Satan or talking to his Little People). Then a personality change would take place during the parts of the film that depicted possession sequences. At this time, Dahmer himself would become aggressive and demand that Edwards place the other handcuff on his wrist. Then, as the filmed possession sequence would change to something more mundane, Dahmer’s mood also shifted and he began to complain about his life and his loneliness.

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In a macabre example of art imitating life imitating art, we have The Exorcist, which was a favorite film of the man eventually identified as the Zodiac Killer, and then Exorcist III, in which the demon-possessed serial murderer, the Gemini Killer, is based on the same Zodiac Killer (who, unknown to the film’s writer, director and producer, was a fan of the first Exorcist movie). This real-life connection then leaps into Jeffrey Dahmer, who is mesmerized by the character and who probably does not realize that the fictional Gemini Killer is based on a real person, a genuine serial murderer such as he himself is becoming, a famous murderer with a taste for the occult and for Satanism, as Robert Graysmith’s sequel to his definitive work on the Zodiac killer, Zodiac Unmasked, amply illustrates.

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Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death in prison in November 1994 by a black inmate, Christopher J. Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for murder. Scarver said that voices in his head told him that he, Scarver, was the Son of God.

Item: Lt. Commander Dr. Thomas Narut—a US Navy psychologist—claimed before a NATO conference of psychologists in Oslo that ONI (the Office of Naval Intelligence) had been using convicted murderers in a bizarre scheme to create the perfect commando. These were men from military prisons who were sent to various US embassies abroad after having been “treated” with behavior modification techniques and turned into assassins “who could kill on command.” Narut was later reprimanded by the Navy and forced to retract his

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Item: It is revealed that Ted Kaczynski, the famed “Unabomber,” had been a test subject in a CIA mind-control project during his university days.

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Kaczynski was one of only twenty-two Harvard undergrads who were part of this secret project from the fall of 1959 to the spring of 1962, a program based loosely on OSS interrogation methods and designed to break down the student’s personality.

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Cameron claimed to be able to create selective amnesia. A combination of drugs, sensory deprivation, monotonous tape recordings of command phrases … but were the side effects too cumbersome? What about surgery? What if we did a little nip-and-tuck in the cerebral cortex? What then?

The example of Arthur Shawcross may be a case in point. A convicted serial killer and rapist, Shawcross had spent time in Vietnam. He claimed to have seen bloody combat in the jungles, and to have first cannibalized his victims there. The Army denied that Shawcross was anywhere near combat, and instead insisted that throughout his tour he had remained “in the rear with the gear.”

When he was finally apprehended for a string of ghastly homicides in and around Rochester, New York, his defense team were not allowed copies of his military medical files. Pictures of his brain, however, showed evidence of medical intervention: symmetrical scarring that his team believed had to have been the result of surgery and not from natural causes. It was Shawcross who claimed to hear voices in his head, ghostly spirits urging him to kill.

Full disclosure: I have read Maury Terry's book The Ultimate Evil, where he claims that David Berkowitz did not work alone, and that the Son of Sam killings were the work of a network or cult of some kind. Terry has taken some flack for the book, both deserving and undeserving.

Deserving, because Terry has a very simplistic view of what he considers "Satanic", which a more nuanced or religiously aware person will find suspect. He also puts far too much weight on coincidences involving certain dates, and sometimes works backwards from already known answers (such as the address of Berkowitz) and unconvincingly shoe-horns them into clues from the Son of Sam letters.

However, despite these flaws, Terry is very good at seperating his personal views and analysis from what he found, what he saw and what people told him. Taking the "raw data" from his book, there is a very persuasive case that Berkowitz was not the only gunman, and that there was a network with possibly some cult overtones or link behind the murders.

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Try as they might, psychologists working on the Son of Sam case could not squeeze the round peg that is David Berkowitz into the square hole that is the “lust” or serial killer. While Berkowitz admits to several of the killings, he insists that he did not commit all of them and that the murders were, in fact, carried out under the orders of a cult to which he belonged. As he is in prison for life with no possibility of parole, he has no ulterior motive for making this claim. Nothing that he says at this point will reduce his sentence and he has, as mentioned, freely admitted to committing some of the murders anyway. By pleading guilty immediately after his apprehension, he denied the rest of us an examination of the available evidence which would have pointed to the existence of the murderous cult to which he belonged. In fact, the evidence collected in the twenty-five years since the time of the killings is now leaning heavily to support this allegation of a cult of murderers operating in the New York metropolitan area as well as in other parts of the country, including North Dakota and California.

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Thus if we include Manson and Berkowitz in any study of serial murder, the statistics will become skewed and much valuable data will be lost. Whatever the psychic disorders suffered by Manson and Berkowitz—and they may be legion—the label of serial killer cannot, in all honesty, be used in their cases.

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In fact, Terry’s evidence goes far to suggest that the Manson and Berkowitz cases may actually be related; that the cult to which Berkowitz belonged in New York City was a branch of the one to which Manson had allegiance.

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In the case of Manson and Berkowitz, we can point to the dim outlines of a cult of killers using occult jargon and ritual to buttress what may have been simply a drug-related criminal operation, much the same way the Matamoros killers used palo mayombe as a front for what were essentially normal, criminal operations.

In the grimoires, we find the same reliance upon set and setting that we will come across again, hundreds of years later in a different context. (Set and setting will also be recognized as a crucial element in psychological warfare and interrogation techniques. The process is all of a piece, and we may be able to understand the entire gestalt better if we look at how each of these practices describes and reinforces the others.)

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Culianu’s most fascinating contribution was Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, a work that is based in part on the writings of the philosopher-magician Giordano Bruno and particularly on his De vinculis, a work that surpasses Machiavelli’s The Prince in its sheer audacity. De vinculis—or “Of the link”—is a virtual operating manual for consensus reality. While it appears on its face to be an introduction to a method of conjuring demons, it is also a guide to psychological warfare, probably the earliest ever

Since there is no English language full translation of De vinculis, I have purchased a copy of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Sadly, I've not yet had a chance to read it in depth.

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Bruno’s hatred of the Catholic Church ran very deep. He had been a Catholic priest himself, one who abandoned the Holy Orders and “defrocked” himself, becoming in the process excommunicate and forbidden by the Church to even attend Mass, much less celebrate it. His hatred of what he saw as Papal idiocy and criminality led him to support various Protestant groups and operations at every opportunity, although he did not consider himself a Christian at all much less a Protestant, and could be more correctly identified as a kind of pagan, a New Age philosopher quite ahead of his time; certainly, he was a magician, and the bulk of his writings after the “Embassy affair” of 1584—in which his espionage activities against French Ambassador to England Michel de Castelnau resulted in the arrest and execution of various individuals who were conspiring with the Church against the Queen—were about occultism.

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Bruno is described as using or contemplating four “arms” or methods of toppling the Papacy: armed force, fraud (or, as Bruno called it, the “art of dissimulation” which, in Bruno’s case, included espionage), ridicule, and magic.

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In Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy records several instances in which Bruno and Dr. Dee met each other, either at Dee’s home in Mortlake or in Prague. Dee was reputed to have the best library in England, and they shared a common interest in the occult as well as in espionage.

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Bruno would eventually be captured by the Inquisition and put to death by being burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600, on orders of the same Pope Clement VIII he had attempted to destroy through magic.

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Although Bruno had written a number of famous and influential works, Culianu concentrates on De vinculis en genere, sometimes referred to simply as De vinculis or “Of Links.” These links, according to Bruno, are those between human beings, but they could just as easily be those that link God to humans; the links to which he refers are any connections that could be made between any created objects at all. Magic is the art of manipulating these links, links which have been activated through the desire of the magician; thus magic is, in other words, eros.

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What is important for us to consider is whether or not the knowledge of this technology was disseminated more widely than the narrow and shadowy corridors of the secret societies. For Bruno took this hermetic concept one step further, to the realm of politics. And so did Culianu.

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That the manipulation of a human being’s memory is tantamount to control over his consciousness is something that was clearly understood by the magicians of the Renaissance and rediscovered by the intelligence officers of the twentieth century; but while the latter threw the entire weight of hypnosis, drugs, electroshock and other heavy-handed machinery at their subjects, Bruno cautioned a lighter touch. It was necessary that his subjects be unaware of his intentions, that they be charmed into performing those actions he required. You couldn’t accomplish this with drugs and psychotherapy unless you wiped the memory and consciousness of the subject clean, as Ewen Cameron tried to do, and that took a lot of time and energy and resources, and the results were never very reliable or consistent.

Bruno’s approach might today be called “subliminal,” that is, below the threshold of conscious awareness. While the operator may train himself in these techniques while in a heightened state of awareness brought about by meditation, ritual, drugs, “Tantric” sex and other devices, it was necessary that the target be free to go about his life un- interrupted and oblivious. Just as one is not aware of the process of falling in love—of all the thousand impressions and subconscious signals that are sent and received in the course of a relationship—just so the target of Bruno’s magic would not be aware that he was being “bewitched,” i.e., psychologically manipulated, until it was too late. The process, according to Bruno and those before him, was virtually identical. Hence, eros is magic because eros charges or activates the link.

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For Bruno, love is the occult force that binds the universe together, and if one can understand love and understand how others love and what they love, then one can control them through their passions and their appetites. If reality is what our conscious minds make of it—a deliberate ordering of sensations in categories of priority, translated by our brain as images of light and dark, color, sound, dimension, etc.—then the way into the mind of another is through the images he or she manufactures. Rather than create a whole, complex reality that will be translated and identified by the subject’s brain, one simply creates the images of the desired reality, working backwards from the image to the result desired.

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Bruno’s strategy employed a technique of going directly to the brain through the use of images, creating an alternate reality over which he was the master. In order for this system to work, it was necessary that the target be “seduced” by the images, i.e., “fall in love” in a sense with the image presented by the magician and thereby allow it to work in his consciousness. For this to happen, the magician himself must expend great amounts of energy—of passion, really—through that image in order to create the “link,” in order to “enchain” the other person or persons and make them instruments of his will. As a corollary, Bruno insists that the magician not allow himself to fall in love with his own images, lest he become enslaved by them and ultimately destroyed. Thus, the magician places himself above love—above all the human passions and desires—so that he is not enchained in turn.

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He must believe he is in love with his subject at the time he works his magic, and not at any other time. This is our introduction, not only to the Manson Secret, but also to the television preacher, the popular politician, the salesman, the advertising executive. Culianu understood all of this, and was perhaps the first person to clarify and enlarge upon this idea. At least, until he was murdered on May 21, 1991 at the age of 41. Culianu’s political involvements were largely unknown or misunderstood by his colleagues. One would have had to have a good working knowledge of the Byzantine conspiracies and intrigues of Romanian politics to get an inkling of Culianu’s dangerous activities. He could not resist writing against the dictatorial Ceaucescu regime, although at times his writings were more in the way of a ludus serius, a kind of game involving symbolic figures, than they were out-and-out broadsides against the Communist leader and his secret police, the Securitate. But Culianu was a living symbol of the rewards that freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the free and open exchange of intellectual ideas could bring. Further, he was a problem for both sides of the Romanian problem: right and left. Although there is no doubt that he was a sincere anti-Communist—living and suffering under a Soviet-style Eastern European dictatorship is enough to convert anyone to democracy and the free-market system, without even knowing what those concepts really represent—he was also anti-Nazi. This, in the context of Eastern European politics, was a difficult position to maintain, for it meant that he attracted enemies from both the Securitate and from various underground movements that had their origins in the ideas, if not in the actual membership roles, of the Romanian Nazi Iron Guard.

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The surrealists sought to tap the powers of the mind using psychiatry and occultism (whatever would work, whatever would help them break through the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness), and in this they are not very different from shamans, not very different from the men of MK- ULTRA. Art—painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, and even (with Bunuel and Dali) cinema—happened to be the medium in which they worked, but surrealism was born on the battlefields of World War I, as the confrontation between life and death, between existence and non-existence, forced a gen- eration of artists to chose between the dangerous ignorance of a cultivated sanity and the seemingly crystal clarity of madness. The hideousness of that conflict, the first “high-technology” war using tanks, airplanes, mass communications, and chemical weapons, traumatized a generation. Breton began life as a medical student, and worked with shell-shocked soldiers at the front. Andre Masson, another important surrealist, fought in the War and spent agonizing hours wounded, lying in a ditch face-to-face with a dead German soldier, literally “facing death.” Using automatic writing, hypnosis, and later various occult techniques and occult studies such as alchemy and ceremonial magic, the surrealists tried to penetrate the secrets of the mind; this endeavor would be repeated by the CIA a few years after World War II, continuing for decades until fear of discovery made them either cancel their projects or disguise them in some way. The preliminary goals of the surrealists and the spies were the same: unlock the secrets of the unconscious mind, understand amnesia, hypnotic trance, hysteria, dissociation, multiple personalities and “the self,” and the human will. Yet, the ultimate goals were quite different. For the surrealists, the liberation of humanity—the perfect freedom of men and women—was their target, their raison d’etre. For the CIA and the military, the aim was the enslavement of those minds and the harnessing of consciousness to political and military purposes. The surrealists used the garret, the artist’s studio, the writer’s desk; the CIA used the laboratory, the interrogation room, the torture chamber.

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It is of great interest to this study that the artistic movement most singled out by the Nazis for destruction was surrealism, for the surrealists may have been polar opposites of the Nazis when it came to political ideas, but they were just as fascinated by the occult and by the possibilities of human consciousness. The Nazis, however, were a cult, and cults can admit of no competing cults.

Coming from a wealthy background as a right-wing American, Field’s political faith wavered, and then finally fell on the side of the left. Around him in Mexico City was a gaggle of left-wingers who professed everything from diehard Communism of the Soviet Communist International or “Comintern” model to revolutionary Castroism—liberal dilettantes who were excited to be this close to real socialists and Communists and who, anyway, professed humanitarian principles ranging from racial integration to a change in American foreign policy in Latin America. In the midst of this cocktail circuit could be discerned such influences as artist (and Communist) Diego Rivera—the aforementioned comrade of Trotsky and Andre Breton—as well as filmmaker Luis Bunuel. As always, surrealism found itself in support of radical political solutions, even as it decried “Soviet realism” in art. It was an eclectic group of people from various backgrounds, and it is in this mélange that we find Marilyn Monroe in February of 1962. Introduced to Field via her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, and his homunculus, Eunice Murray, Monroe and Field became fast friends.

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This preponderance of closet Communists around Marilyn Monroe is a fact that deserves much more scrutiny than it has been given so far—except by Summers and Wolfe, aforementioned. Even her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was a Communist, and was approved by the Party as a politically- reliable shrink, a functionary of an organization infiltrated to an extent by European émigrés who owed their allegiance to both Freud and Marx. This organization, known as the Psychoanalytic Institutes, with offices in most major American cities, and which contained within its ranks members of various political affiliations, served as a secure means for Communist Party members to meet and exchange information. Psychiatry, in general, was a wonderful mechanism for running “cells” in a foreign country. No one would question why a person had to meet secretly with a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist; in fact, many psychiatrists’ offices are designed to permit only one person at a time in the waiting area, and each patient leaves by a separate exit so that no patient need be seen by another.

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Just as the CIA was in full throttle on MK-ULTRA, the Soviets were using traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic settings in the United States to serve as Comintern fronts and, perhaps, to condition and control certain select patients. When we see the degree to which Monroe depended upon Greenson, and when we learn of Greenson’s bizarre “anti-analytic” approach with Monroe in direct violation of his own, published therapeutic principles, we can easily understand how a charge could be made that Monroe was being deliberately manipulated by the Comintern. And when we learn that E. Howard Hunt—former CIA agent, formerly stationed in Mexico City, one of the Watergate Plumbers himself, and present during the break-in at Fielding’s office—was a good friend of the last man to call himself Marilyn Monroe’s lover, Jose Bolanos, we are forced to take a completely different look at the events of 1962 and 1963.

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In 1962, Operation Mongoose was in full swing, as the US government ramped up to destabilize Cuba and assassinate Castro. The missiles were starting to arrive in Cuba, smaller tactical missiles at first and then the ICBMs. By late 1961, incoming CIA Station Chief in Mexico, David Atlee Phillips, already knew the first of the missiles were there. By July 1962 everyone at Langley knew. Hunt was still the CIA liaison with the Cuban exiles, trying to keep up their spirits after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. And here was Marilyn Monroe, drinking mezcal with the Reds and—who knows?—maybe eating the worm. She was already friendly with Robert Kennedy, and had been asking him a great many leading political questions, questions provided to her by a suspiciously helpful Dr. Greenson. She would then report on these meetings, in all innocence, in the Zona Rosa to Comintern member Frederick Field, to E. Howard Hunt intimate Jose Bolanos, and from there to …?

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In addition, Robert Kennedy would be informed sometime in 1962 that the CIA under General Lansdale (whom we encountered in Book I in his incarnation as a psychological warfare expert) was subcontracting the Castro assassination to the Mafia, using the ever-helpful Robert Maheu as cutout. Ms. Monroe’s friendship with Mafiosi Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana—themselves deeply involved in these same clandestine arrangements and directly involved with both Richard Nixon and E. Howard Hunt—went back a ways as well, dating from the beginning of her Sinatra period, and this just wove the noose around her neck a little tighter. All around her were some of the seminal figures in the history of modern American covert operations and the Cold War. And, it was suspected, she was writing it all down in her ever-present red-bound diary.

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Ms. Monroe’s interest in the Kennedy brothers, and particularly in Bobby Kennedy, was purely romantic. As far as we can discern from witness interviews at the time, Marilyn Monroe was despondent over her relationship with the Attorney General, whom she believed would leave his wife and children in order to marry her. They had argued about a number of political issues, however, including nuclear testing and Cuba as it turns out, with Bobby Kennedy eventually accusing her of turning Communist on the basis of her leftist views.

So, who wanted Marilyn dead? As in the case of the John F. Kennedy assassination a year later, the list of suspects is a long one. At one time, her home was being bugged and her phones tapped by the FBI as well as by an “independent investigator,” whose employer might have been either the Mob or the CIA. She was under surveillance by them all. Her association with both the Kennedys and with the Comintern made her a dangerous woman; had the CIA succeeded in assassinating Castro, it is entirely possible that Ms. Monroe would have gone public with what she knew. She was already feeding information to the Mexico City Communists, as well as to Jose Bolanos who, we suspect, was working for E. Howard Hunt. She was a liability to the Kennedys, to the FBI, and to the CIA—specifically, to Operation Mongoose; and, to the extent that she could jeopardize Operation Mongoose, she was a liability to the Mafia.

The only people who did not want Marilyn Monroe dead would have been the Communists themselves, since she was so close to the President, the Attorney General, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, “Operation Mongoose,” etc., etc. It would have been insane to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs.

However, by July of 1962 and only weeks before her death, she had realized that something wasn’t right with Greenson and Murray. She told her ex-husband Robert Slatzer that she was going to fire them all. Was a decision made to silence her before she could reveal the existence of this clandestine Communist cell in Hollywood and Mexico City?

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The weekend of July 28-29 probably holds a key to what transpired only days later. Ms. Monroe spent the weekend at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, and the mystery that surrounds this weekend is impenetrable. That something loathsome did take place, and that it involved Marilyn Monroe who was only now making an important comeback, is certain, if only because of the reticence of eyewitnesses to discuss it.

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Her ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio—icon of American baseball and one of the men who truly loved Marilyn—arrived unexpectedly at the scene. No one knows how he knew his ex-wife would be there, but he showed up and was not allowed inside the complex of bungalows that had been reserved for Monroe, Sinatra, and Giancana, on orders from Sinatra.

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When DiMaggio returned from Lake Tahoe, he told his friend Harry Hall that he was furious with what had happened, that Sinatra had kept Monroe on drugs, and that they had “sex parties.” To clarify what was meant by that, photographer Billy Woodfield was quoted as saying that Sinatra gave him a roll of film from that weekend. When Woodfield developed the roll, he evidently found photos of Marilyn being sexually abused by, or at least in the presence of, Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. In other words, Marilyn Monroe was likely drugged, raped, and photographed; the photos would be used as blackmail against her if she decided to come forward with what she knew about the Kennedys, the Mafia, and Castro.

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A drugged Monroe was returned to Los Angeles late the night of July 29-30, in the company of Peter Lawford. Monroe was returned to her home in a limo, but Lawford rode with the flight crew to his beach home. Before arriving home, he asked the crew to stop for a moment so he could make a call from a pay phone (knowing his own home was bugged and his phones tapped). He made a mysterious phone call that lasted about twenty minutes before finally going home in the early hours of that morning. That phone call was logged into the White House, a call that went directly to the President. Marilyn’s last days were a turmoil of political intrigue. It seems the blackmail effort was not panning out the way everyone thought it would.

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On August 4, 1962—at the age of only thirty-six—she died. The crime scene was a mess; forensics were a joke. It was the proverbial “locked room” mystery, in which the victim was murdered in a room that was locked from the inside. She was said to have overdosed on sleeping pills … but none were found in her digestive tract. There was no glass of water in that locked room to enable her to swallow what were estimated to be nearly 50 capsules. And no hypodermic syringe.

While the Catholic Church has been officially silent on the matter of Malachi Martin, his books have been popular among a certain segment of the Catholic population, who believe that there is an evil, Satanic element within the Vatican that has hijacked the Church for its own purposes. Martin was writing about this years before revelations exploded about the Vatican banking scandals, the Masonic P-2 society infiltration of the Vatican as high as cardinal level, and the alleged murder of Pope John Paul I after only thirty days as Pontiff.

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Martin also alleged that there existed within the Church something he called the “Superforce,” which was the name he gave to the cabal of evildoers within the Vatican that perpetrated not only political and financial crimes, but which was also involved in pedophilia and other sexual scandals, some under the guise of a satanic cult of sex abusers.

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[Martin's] ...most vocal opponent and the source of the scurrilous rumors about him is Robert Blair Kaiser, in his autobiography Clerical Error. Kaiser’s book has been both praised and attacked by Catholics, largely depending upon where they stand where the subject of Father Martin is concerned. Having begun his career as a candidate for the priesthood, spending eight years at a Jesuit seminary, Kaiser abandoned Holy Orders and eventually won a posting with Time magazine in Rome, covering the controversial Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) of Pope John XXIII and winning awards for his reporting in the process, reporting that was assisted in no small part by Malachi Martin. In Clerical Error, Kaiser accuses Martin of abusing their relationship by sleeping with his wife while he was a houseguest of the Kaisers.

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Yet, defenders of Father Martin point to a paucity of documentation supporting Kaiser’s contentions and insist that his period spent in a mental institution—where he was diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoia and schizophrenia—has contributed to a wild tale without foundation,

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How strange, then, that we find Mr. Kaiser three years after the close of Vatican II back in Los Angeles working as a stringer when the Robert F. Kennedy assassination occurred, jumping at the chance to become involved in Sirhan’s defense team and gaining unprecedented access to Sirhan for the ostensible purpose of writing a book and some articles as a means of raising money for the defense lawyers.

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Kaiser shifted gears numerous times during the investigation and subsequent trial, going from conviction that there was a conspiracy involved and that Sirhan was a hypnotically-programmed assassin, to his final verdict that Sirhan acted alone and fired all the shots that killed the Senator.

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According to interviews with Malachi Martin and other sources—some available on religious Web sites on the Internet, some via Art Bell’s syndicated radio talk shows—self-confessed serial killer David Berkowitz of the Son of Sam killings asked to speak to Fr. Martin while in jail before his sentencing. Martin obliged, and subsequently refused all offers of a book deal or other financial gain from the fruits of that meeting,